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Macroscopic quantum entanglement of Kondo cloud at finite temperature
Seung-Sup Lee, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
27.05.2014 at 09:00
Macroscopic entanglement, measured by entanglement entropy, characterizes the new aspects of many-body systems at zero temperature, such as area law, topological order, and quantum criticality. Generalizing the characterization to finite temperature is desirable. For example, it remains unexplored how the entanglement of Kondo systems, the representative of macroscopic entanglement, thermally decays. However, the generalization has been obstructed by the impractical cost of computing entanglement in thermal mixed states. Here we develop a variational approach for the computation, using entanglement witness operators (EWs), and compute the entanglement of formation (EoF), a mixed-state generalization of entanglement entropy, in single- (1CK) and two-channel Kondo (2CK) systems. The thermal suppression of EoF shows crossover around Kondo temperature, and obeys power-law scaling at low temperature. The scaling exponent is halved from 1CK to 2CK, attributed to a Majorana fermion, a ''half'' of a complex fermion, emerging in 2CK. Moreover, EoF characterizes the size and power-law tail of Kondo screening cloud in 1CK.
A318 - Theresienstr. 37